In the digital age, organizations increasingly rely on digitally stored data. To protect against data loss, organizations may use snapshot technologies to create a point-in-time image of a storage device from which a backup of the storage device may be created. To improve storage system performance, organizations may use caching technologies to cache reads from and/or writes to a relatively slow storage device in faster cache memory.
Unfortunately, attempts to (1) protect against data loss and (2) improve storage system performance by combining common snapshot solutions with common caching solutions may be problematic because certain caching technologies may cause the data stored within a storage device to be point-in-time inconsistent. For example, a typical caching solution may implement a write-back policy to cache writes destined for a storage device. While implementing write-back caching, the caching solution may selectively store some of the writes destined for the storage device to cache memory instead of to the storage device. By selectively storing writes to cache memory instead of to the storage device, the caching solution may cause the data within the storage device to be point-in-time inconsistent. If a snapshot solution is unaware of these writes stored within cache memory, the snapshot solution may create snapshots of the storage device that are also point-in-time inconsistent (e.g. a snapshot of the storage device may not contain all the writes destined for the storage device at the time the snapshot of the storage device is created). For this reason, any backup of the storage device that is created from the data within the snapshot of the storage device may also be point-in-time inconsistent and potentially unusable. Accordingly, the instant disclosure addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for enabling write-back-cache aware snapshot creation.